


Today, This Could Be ...

by rockfish



Category: Miranda (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Internal Monologue, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 21:06:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rockfish/pseuds/rockfish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Miranda has a day at home, and thinks a little deeper about her answer to Stevie's question: what was it she really felt for both Mike and Gary? </p><p>Set during or after the events of 3x05.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Today, This Could Be ...

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vikitty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vikitty/gifts).



> For the ever-wonderful "uppercasemad", who has written so much beautiful Miracle fic, and is also a lovely (LOVELY!) person! =D
> 
> This was inspired by an online discussion about that 3x05 scene where Miranda imagines Mike bringing her tea and Gary snogging her face off: the truth of her reaction, but also the deeper feelings she really has for the two men.

_“She’s emotionally constipated, and I’m her metaphorical prune.” – Stevie_

Miranda’d be the first person to tell you she normally enjoyed spending time on her own, in her beloved flat full of bright, colourful things that made her happy. For all that she was confused about love right now, she was sure of one thing: she didn’t have these feelings because she disliked being single. There’d been many a great evening spent in the company of her fruit friends and vegetepals – even if their numbers tended to fluctuate based on (a) her weekly shop at Sainsbury’s and (b) how hungry she got, of an evening. 

This time though, her companions were her thoughts, and they weren’t NEARLY as much fun. It was down to Stevie, although not really; all she’d done was finally turn the lights on with her question. 

“What do you feel when you think of Mike? And what do you feel when you think of Gary?”

Miranda’d be the first person to tell you, she had a bit of a problem with honesty. Oh, not that she wasn’t honest, as the staff and clientele of a certain hip clothing retailer could attest. Not that she was too honest – after all, when socially awkward, she’d been known to lie to impress (everyone does it).

No, her problem was she couldn’t keep a handle on her honesty. It was all or nothing, fight or flight, shout across a crowded room, or sing while edging her way backwards to the door. Like a neverending game of Truth or Dare. At times of pressure, with everyone’s feelings to take into account, including her own … she never quite knew what she’d come out with next. 

Miranda’d be the first person to tell you, she wasn’t one for moping around, for needless navel-gazing, and worst of all, for doubting how she was built as a person. Her life was made for living in, laughing in – and, soon as this was resolved, she’d get back to that, whatever else happened. But there was no sidestepping the GAUNTLET of this lonely day: to process this latest, loudest, most problematic truth, completely for herself. (OK, maybe the newest Mr Butternut was there too.)

~~~ 

Saturday saw Miranda curled up on the couch, in her lovely snuggly red duvet, mug of tea in her hands and a pensive look on her face to match that she’d painted on Mr Butternut himself. This day of truth was to be accompanied by the musical stylings of Take That, and true to form, Gary Barlow was channelling the Bee Gees, asking “How Deep Is Your Love?” Indeed, Other Gary.

First, though, Mike. It was easier, somehow: not much easier, but a little. Miranda looked down at her mug, and winced at how she’d thought of him when Stevie asked. Winced because she felt guilty over the image she’d of him - though of course she had no control over her first thought, nor was she meant to: that was the point. It was the first sharp shock of truth.

Still: pottering around in a dressing-gown and kissing her on her forehead, like her dad? Mike had kissed her plenty more passionately than that – how do you think they got out of their clothes and into those dressing-gowns in the first place? Miranda smiled at THAT thought: their fumbling, shy, funny and thrilling first time. The times since that, as they began to know how to please each other, still chuckling through the lust, long warm nights filled with affection. The looks they’d exchange in the kitchen in the morning, over, yes, tea. It hit her that they’d never get to finish that exploration: those few times were to be all they had. 

The thought made her ridiculously sad. She turned away, mentally, towards her other answer: what did Gary make her feel? 

Well, now that was a thought worth entertaining a little. My God, the things she wanted to do to that man. It was animal – so strong it actually frightened her sometimes, the way her heart wanted to leap out of her chest and into his - not in an “Alien” sort of way. More - a sheer burst of untrammelled emotion. This latest, Gary in a vest and bandanna throwing army-style shapes, was only one vision to add to many (mostly based on which films she’d been watching recently - thank you, Channel 4 rerun of “Rambo”). He’d been the star of her sexual fantasies for a goodly while, and that had to say something, something about the uncontrollable nature of her feelings for him. 

As “Relight My Fire” got into its wacky early 90s groove, Miranda hugged her duvet to her, her toes curling at the thought of Gary – and then, she remembered something else, associated with that same duvet. The cold bed dance, both of them wriggling companionably to thaw out the chill, a bedful of sexual tension keeping company somehow with the pure fact of their friendship. It wasn’t all about sex, though it was an undercurrent – it was the fact that sharing a bed with him felt normal. It felt like, if they could only break that barrier of intimacy, join the two parallel forces of their relationship, they’d be everything to each other. Gary was Rambo and an officer and a gentleman and a sexy chef (that last one, he really was too), but he was Gary. Her Gary. 

Her Marple, though. On that same couch, she shivered at a pleasant memory: her and Mike on their first date, awkwardly cradling warm glasses of white wine with the Spice Girls cooing in the background. It was a first kiss of the tingliest kind: two strangers, really, getting closer, the slight hesitation before he kissed her the first time, before they deepened it the second time. Acknowledging that yes, this was going to be a romantic relationship, with all that entailed from the outset. 

Gary. She knew that kissing him wouldn’t be the sparkling hesitancy of strangers getting to know each other, but the blazing elemental pull of two people who were, very probably, meant for each other all along. It was amazing and indisputable now and terrifying: after all she’d chased him, all the times they’d brinked, she still couldn’t handle just how much of her happiness would be dependent on him. Not all of it - she wasn’t that sort of person – but, undeniably, a massive, massive part of her life. If someone as lovely and loving as Mike couldn’t sway her in the end, this love had to be a force of nature, a Cathy-and-Heathcliff for the emotionally constipated and socially incoherent. 

Miranda couldn’t bear it any longer, and she wasn’t sure she could bear listening to “Back for Good”, right now either. She got up from the couch, pushing the duvet off onto the floor, and went to change the song and make herself another cup of tea in the hope it would provide some comfort. Standing at the kitchen with Mr Butternut the Third (don’t ask what happened to the Second) on the work surface for company, she couldn’t help but think of the fateful recent dinner party, where everything and everyone crashed into each other and this whole mess really seemed to lurch onto the tracks.

Images of both men danced through her mind: Mike, standing up to his father, standing up for her too, in front of a roomful of people for whom he was still kind of an outsider and who thought his dad was (deservedly) a pillock. Declaring he loved her, before she even knew how painful it would be to not love him back that way.

The smile on Gary’s face as she let loose about the joy of childishness. How he unhesitatingly told his self-assured, superficial, pretty, JOGGING-WITHOUT-A-BRA girlfriend that he wouldn’t let her insult his best friend, who was as irrevocably a part of his life as he was of hers.

Mike, dancing goofily as he flicked bubbles at her, an expression of purely dorky joy on his lovely face, feeling like he too could really be himself with her now, maybe forever more.

Gary … she couldn’t remember Gary then. He must not have danced; he must have not been happy. She only remembered his absence, like a darkness.

Both of them seemed still present, in the corners of the room. She stirred her tea, round and round. She knew both of those men, was attracted to both of them (especially when they were squabbling over a power drill, ooh). She could be both of those women, who loved them back.

On her own, without either of them there that day, Miranda had to know: who was it she could not live without ever seeing again? Leaving Mike would be like shutting the door on a beautiful room already filling up with memories, all of their words and kisses and possible futures locked away and preserved, motionless, for fond and eventually less painful remembrance. But leaving Gary would be like leaving home itself, forever: he was everywhere around her, right here and now, in the past and surely in her future. Leaving him was unthinkable.

So, Miranda stopped thinking it over: it wasn’t like she didn’t know, like all of this hadn’t confirmed what Stevie’d already sprung out of her. She had no idea what would happen next though, what she’d do with the knowledge. It could be a mess, or it could be more or less fine (probably a mess, though) - but it would be true, in the end. Right on cue, Take That launched into “Greatest Day”, even though it could well become the worst. 

When there was a knock on the door, she flinched, and then straightened herself, and Mr Butternut too for good measure. Whoever it as, and dear Lord in heaven it was probably only her mother or the oracle Stevie, but even if not … she’d face them. She was ready.


End file.
